[Focus] NIS budget management has hole

Suspicions are increasingly being raised about the operation of the budget of the nation¡¯s top intelligence agency following the alleged diversion of funds of the former Agency for National Security Planning (NSP), now the National Intelligence Service (NIS), into election campaign funds for the then-ruling party candidates in the 1995 local and 1996 general elections.

Transfer of a total of 119.2 billion won to the then-ruling New Korea Party ahead of the elections was confirmed to have come from the budget of the NSP, according to the Supreme Public Prosecutor¡¯s Office.

NIS budget management:

The budget of the NIS, classified as second-degree confidential, can be divided into three types on the whole.

The first is the general account budget, which is usually made public. It is used mostly for fixed expenses such as personnel expenditures, so there is almost no possibility that it can be diverted or misappropriated. It was about 220 billion won in 1999.

The second is the so-called expense for activities to ensure national security (423 billion won in 1999), which the intelligence agency can draw from the reserve funds of the Ministry of Planning and Budget (the Ministry of Finance and Economy in the past). Other government agencies, in the event they apply for the use of the reserve funds, must present details on how to use the money to the Cabinet for approval. But the NIS only needs to obtain Cabinet endorsement of the total amount of money.

Therefore, the budget has the highest potential of being diverted or misappropriated. The budget of the Ministry of Finance and Economy that was suspected of flowing into the then-ruling New Korea Party as campaign funds is classified as an expense for activities to ensure national security.

The third is the reserve fund allotted for the Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Unification and police. But this fund is not used directly by the NIS. It has only the right to adjust the budget to set the money the government agencies can spend for their respective activities to ensure national security. Of course, a possibility cannot be ruled out that the NIS might slash the reserve fund of the concerned agencies to use the reduced amount as its budget.

At present, the president can appropriate the NIS budget in the course of governing because the settlement is made in the concept of total amount, without details about how it is used, virtually making it impossible to supervise the money. Therefore, whether the NIS can divert the budget is totally up to the discretion of the chief executive.

Procedure of forming a governing fund:

In the days of the military regimes in the past, it was a convention to use the NSP budget as a ¡°fund for ruling.¡± The president¡¯s gift of money was a sort of fund for ruling. Rumors had it that a huge amount of fund for ruling was given and taken when the then three parties merged into the Democratic Liberal Party in 1990 under the government of President Roh Tae-Woo.

Yet it once was a typical practice that the president or NSP director had raised campaign funds through enterprises in the general or presidential elections instead of having used the NSP budget.

Former President Chun Doo-Hwan at one time ordered an NSP official to raise campaign funds ahead of the 13th presidential election. His successor, Roh Tae-Woo, received money directly from the owners of conglomerates at the presidential mansion.

It was an established opinion that former President Kim Young-Sam misappropriated the NSP budget as campaign money in the 1996 general elections because he had declared earlier ¡°I won¡¯t accept a single penny in political funds.¡± It is presumed that the leading members of the former ruling camp who could not secure political funds from enterprises made free with the NSP budget under a sense of a crisis.